Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates
RELIGION AND EROTIC
from the rocky island of Ithaca to the charming valleys of Lacedemon, and had in vain tried to persuade his daughter to remain there. In silence she had veiled her face and followed her beloved.
When throughout Greece men were recruited and gathered together to call up all the famous heroes for an expedition of revenge against Troy, whose prince, Paris, had offended all Greece by the rape of Helen and the robbery of boundless treasures, then Thetis took her son Achilles, the youthful distinguished ephebus, with maternal care to the island of Scyros, where he was to have been brought up among the daughters of Lycomedes so that he need not take part in the cruelties of war. (That, so far as I know, is certainly the oldest and perhaps a unique example of co-education in Greek antiquity—the Greeks were too intelligent to tolerate such mischief ; they would have called it a yoking together of horse and ox.)1 The natural consequences of this educational experiment did not fail to show themselves, for Achilles, though among the maidens, did not feel like one, and the king’s little daughter, Deidameia, was one fine day obliged to confess blushingly to her mother, that she carrieda child in her womb by her delicate fellow-pupil who was roaming about in girl’s clothes. This child later became the famous hero Neoptolemus. In a celebrated picture by Polygnotus described by Pausanias, Achilles had been already represented dressed in feminine garb ; a specially characteristic, strongly erotic picture from the hand of Giolfino hangs in the Museo Civico at Verona.
At the destruction of Troy Cassandra was obliged to consent to be torn away from the statue of the maiden Pallas, that her youthful bloom might be sacrificed to the might of the Locrian Ajax.
1 Tt is well known that Odysseus, to avoid taking part in the Trojan war, feigned madness, thereby proving that he had yoked horse and ox together to the plough : Pausanias, i, 22, 6. On Achilles amongst the girls,
cf. also Ovid, Metam., xiii, 162 ff.; Statius, 1, 206 ff. On works of art, O. Jahn: Archaologische Beitrage, p. 352 ; Overbeck, p. 287.
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